
In a new report, students study the intersection between arts, culture, and gender-based stereotypes to better understand trends in law and policy worldwide.
Written by Blanche Helbling L’21, a former student in de Silva de Alwis’s course, “International Women’s Human Rights.”
Arts and culture play critical roles in shaping the social norms that are reflected in and reinforced by laws across the world.
This semester, students in “Women, Law, and Leadership” — a trailblazing course taught by Rangita de Silva de Alwis, Senior Adjunct Professor of Global Leadership and Visiting Faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Expert Member to the treaty body on the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women — reflected on the ways in which visual art has impacted women’s societal power throughout the course of history. The class compiled their work in a collaborative report entitled “Putting Women Back into the Picture,” which features dozens of visual art pieces spanning a multitude of media, cultures, and historical eras.
“Through a world-class line up of guest speakers and critical discussions of independent thinking, Professor de Silva de Alwis’ Women Law and Leadership provided me with an all-encompassing picture of the profound challenges that women and other marginalized individuals face in cultivating their own leadership styles in a variety of settings, including in law firms, non-profit boards, corporate meetings, and even law school classrooms,” said Alexis Arroyo L’24, a student in the course. “This class was the first time in law school that ‘things clicked’ for me and I began to see the power in leaning into my own strengths to cultivate my own leadership.”
For, Arroyo, the project underscored the importance of the work that women throughout history have put into creating more equitable prospects for future generations.
Throughout the report, students analyzed historic, contemporary, and personal artworks through gender, racial, and colonial lenses. In one of her contributions, Arroyo shared a photograph of a quilt made by her grandmother. After facing much adversity throughout her life, Arroyo’s grandmother started quilting, as “a hobby, a talent, and a love language.”
The following is an excerpt of “Putting Women Back into the Picture”:
This small project on personal and political art and photography grew out of our class’s study of the “Oxford and the Empire” project and the role of art and photography in constructing gender, race, and class. The Oxford photo exhibition is a critical exploration of the way in which the British Empire was represented as a civilizing project at Oxford, the breeding ground of the Empire. While white women were portrayed as women of culture and leisure, women in the colonies were portrayed as those engaged in hard labor. This stereotyped depiction of women demanded critical examination through gender, race, and post-colonial lenses.
A review of Katy Hessel’s exquisitely probing text on “The Story of Art Without Men” concludes that “It will take many more feats of scholarship and advocacy before the center of gravity of the white, male, western, imperial canon is exploded, and women are fully written into global art history. Another initiative that influenced the class was the recent Morgan Library’s exhibition “She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia” on the world’s first author, the poet and priestess Enheduanna. While the world has come to recognize Homer as the first known writer, Enheduanna is a female figure lurking in the shadows of history. We have placed Enheduanna back in the picture as our cover page art. Lauren Yagoda [L’23], a student in the class, has written her essay in the tradition of a Homeric epic, but this time about a woman of the 21st century, a leading Black woman lawyer and art collector, the General Counsel of the New York Public Library who joined our class as a guest speaker. Lauren’s creative work on leadership develops an alternative to the Great Man Theory of Leadership which was spawned by the Homeric epics. This multidimensional gallery of art, photography, and monuments by a group of young lawyers and law students is a small contribution to putting those women back into the picture.
Read the entirety of “Putting Women Back into the Picture.”
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